Ponder, Wander, Love and Learn

Monday, June 24, 2013

Last month my knees hurt. They felt like shattering glass when I try to crawl across my hardwood floors. A stretching tendon pulls like a fresh rubber band when I uncross my legs. Bone and cartilage scrape against each other when I climb stairs, and I was over it. I committed to doing "30 Days of Squats" to help, and the first week was great. It was a lot of squats 50, 70 120 a day. I was squatting in the bathroom, while I put on make up, I'd squat at my desk. My knees got stronger, I could feel muscles in my thighs and butt, and then I stopped. I forgot about squats. It was unconscious. I didn't remember until I logged in here to make a new post about changing jobs and changing attitudes, and I realized a few things:

I've never worked hard, sacrificed for anything. Things have always come easy to me, and if they didn't, I found something else to do that took less effort. I reasoned to myself that following your destiny was easy, and therefore I was always doing the right thing because it was the easiest thing to do. Ha! Right! What the hell was I thinking. Writing, reading, photography, learning is all work, and somethings are harder to learn than others. I'm learning this now with photography and losing weight. I need to pay attention and give a real effort. It won't kill me.

So I'm starting a new job next Monday. I go in an hour later. I am committing myself to the following:

-30 minutes at home of yoga, or some type of exercise and in return a good 15 minutes to myself with coffee in the morning.
-30 minutes of walking on my lunch breaks
-Smaller dinners

I truly believe changing those things will create a huge difference in my life. I also commit to checking in here weekly.

Friday, March 1, 2013

I've been suffocated by skinny thoughts since I was small. When I was little my mother and aunts would talk about how they never wanted to grow up and be fat like my grandmother. They barely ate, and would panic if they ever got close to filling out their size 2s. And they told me regularly, how I was going to regret whatever it was I was about to put into my mouth. I guess I was rebelling even then.

When I was 6, my parents joined Amway. Our house filled with Amway products: cleaning supplies, paper plates, and prepackaged food, and I was thrilled. My favorite was the individual sized potato chips. I learned that I have an addiction to sour cream and onion potato chips. Okay, it's not an addiction, but I'm pretty sure my mom thought it was. I probably ate 10 bags in 2 days and my mom lost it when she noticed. No more, she said, while I ate just one more. One a day, she said, after my third bag. Then she hid them and I cried. But we lived in a trailer, and there aren't that many hiding spaces. I found them in the pan cupboard, and proceeded to hide in my closet with the rest of them. She reminded me again, that I would regret eating like that, and I hate to admit that my mom was right but today, I do.

I was eating my feelings, and they tasted good. I should have been dealing with life, I should have been standing up for myself when I was picked on for being poor, or dressing differently (because at six I was idolizing early Madonna and wearing cut up tights when everyone else was wearing bows and ribbons), but I was six, and I had no idea what I was doing. I've always been the kind of person that learns from experience, and now I've experienced life as a beautiful plus sized girl and I'm done.

Life is different now. I've dealt with most of those emotional eating issues, and now I eat when I'm hungry, and I eat what tastes delightful but I want something more. What I want now, is to run, to climb, to do a chin up and I want to be able to breath when I climb three flights of stairs to get into our new loft. Oh, and I want to shop somewhere besides Old Navy and Lane Bryant. So I'm going to use this blog to discuss my journey toward physical health.

I am eating approximately 1200 calories a day, and spending time doing cardio, weights and yoga. I'm very excited to have space in the new loft to do yoga by myself. There is something so personal about just feeling where my body is tight and just focusing my mind and body on loosening it. But I don't move until next month and until then, I'm doing yoga at the gym.